Three students from city felicitated
Axis Bank felicitated the national winners of SPLASH, an annual pan-India competition on art, craft, and literature for children in the age group of 7-14 years.
Gripped under fund constraints, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation is now focusing on bringing more and more not assessed properties into the spectrum of assessed properties as one of the ways of maximising its revenue collection.
According to mayor Firhad Hakim, the tax collection department of the KMC has been able to bring 20 thousand not assessed properties into the spectrum to assessed properties last year. Giving his concluding remarks over the Budget Session of the municipal corporation for the next fiscal, the mayor agreed to the Opposition’s claims of the fund crunches being faced by the civic body. He, however, also cited the reasons for it. The mayor pointed out that the KMC does suffer from fund constraints as unlike Mumbai Municipal Corporation it does not get tax revenue from numerous highrises. “There is nothing to deny that like the Mumbai Municipal Corporation, a huge amount of tax is generated from beautiful high rises. Around more than 50 per cent people living here, are poor. Even then the revenue tax expenditure has been increased by 9.16 per cent. The deficit has been reduced to 40.66 per cent over the years,” underlined Mr Hakim.
Advertisement
Later, speaking on the sidelines of the concluding Budget Session, the mayor reiterated how the civic body’s focus has shifted from the past regimes to the present in terms of revenue generation. According to the mayor, there was a time when the former mayor, Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya sold KMC lands for managing the financial conditions of the municipal corporation. “While we are trying to enhance the financial conditions by bringing the unassessed properties that had disputes by solving the issues. Without increasing the taxes, we are trying to bring unassessed properties into assessed ones and putting efforts to run the expenses of the civic body,” said Mr Hakim.
Advertisement
Advertisement
